Did you know that the new environmental regulations will cost Detroit $85 billion and they're going to make you pay for all of it? Wow, I'm shaking in my boots. So instead of gradually moving in this direction decades ago when foreign car makers decided the long term future was not gas guzzlers, Detroit used political muscle with goons like Congressman Dingell to delay the inevitable making it much more expensive for Big Auto. Let's all feel sorry for the management in Detroit that made these idiotic decisions, shall we? You know, the people who has dragged the industry down and fired tens of thousands of workers.
Detroit can certainly raise their prices and they probably will. If that's how they think they can become competitive, more power to them. With the weak dollar, they may even have a window of opportunity to pass the buck on to the consumer but that also will be a short term strategy. They can find all of the media stooges they want to tell us how tough it's going to be but it's still not going to help them compete. They made their bed, now they can go sleep in it.
The way people like Dingell and his fellow Detroit Big Auto enablers act, you would think it's still 1950 when GM and Ford hired people and stood at the top of the pile. In the real world, those companies have blown massive their leadership positions thanks to decades of incompetent management. The same people who ran their respective companies into the ground want to run our country into the ground by ruining the environment.
If GM and Ford were still sitting at the top, as much as I might not like it, I could see them as a force in Washington. The difference here is their track record is clear and it is not good. Why do we allow these clowns to control the destiny of our country like this? Big Auto ought to be spending more time on competing with the rest of the world instead of mucking about with our environment. The enablers all allow this to happen.
And Pelosi, to her great credit, stood up to him. And she's right. It would have been all out war had Dingell tried to pass this crap. This happened last month, reportedly:
[John] Dingell (D-Mich.) [chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee] appeared in the speaker's conference room to walk through a bill that would override California's attempts to combat global warming by raising fuel efficiency standards, strip the Environmental Protection Agency of its authority to regulate greenhouse gases and promote a controversial effort to turn coal into liquid fuel.
This time, Pelosi was in no mood to mollify Dingell. The bill he was sponsoring, she said, was unacceptable. The environmental costs would be too severe, the political costs for the Democratic caucus too high, she said.
We've written about Dingell before. The man is a shill for the auto industry, and couldn't give a damn about global warming or helping ween us from our dependency on oil. Maybe a Democrat who pushes Senator Inhofe's extreme loony-tunes agenda doesn't deserve to be a Democratic committee chair.
